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“... the revival of liberal political philosophy in the United States in the 1960s, and his reviews of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin remain some of the most acute there are. But these philosophers started from within. They may have been prompted to write by the establishment of civil rights in the 1960s and the domestic consequences of the Vietnam War, but these ...”

“... or Scottish privateers. Most of them worked as servants in London or in southern port towns. John Blanke was a trumpeter who performed at court. In 1509 he was present at the funeral of Henry VII and performed at Henry VIII’s coronation. Two years later he performed in the celebrations heralding the birth of Prince Henry, the longed-for son of Henry ...”

“... is complicated. Every crypto transaction since the invention of bitcoin has been recorded on a freely accessible ledger known as a blockchain. Even armchair sleuths can track the movements of crypto between wallets. ‘Whale Alert’, the best known tracker of ‘large and interesting transactions’, has 2.5 million followers on X. The simplest way to ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... character’ of language. That phrase comes in the title of a deeply representative book by John Wilkins. It is altogether fitting that a leading figure in the Royal Society should have been preoccupied by such inquiries. One recalls that in the Grand Academy of Lagado the mechanical operation of words figures more largely than experiments with mice ...”

“... but as home secretary he came into his own.One of Sidmouth’s spies, a man called John Castle, was on the action committee responsible for organising the huge and supposedly peaceful meeting of reformers on Spa Fields that was to be addressed by the mellifluous Orator Hunt. Castle tirelessly whipped up the labourers who had just been laid off ...”

“... comment to begin to break down the distinction between ‘realism’ and ‘escapism’, used freely as terms of approval and abuse (often in relation to Britain and Hollywood respectively). John Caughie contributes a sharp set of notes on broadcasting and the cinema, among other things tracing the influence of Scottish ...”

“... 1982 and she had to stop corresponding with foreign Tsvetaeva scholars, though she had done so freely in the Seventies. In 1986, instead of Kudrova’s book, a most peculiar (but politically correct) biography by Anna Saakiants appeared: Marina Tsvetaeva: Pages from her Life and Work (1910-1922). By restricting her purview to those 12 years, Saakiants was ...”

“... William Gladstone or Abraham Lincoln ordering the murder of foreign leaders or the overthrow of freely-elected governments. The Duke of Wellington even refused to allow the guns to fire at Napoleon during the Battle of Waterloo. Bismarck holidayed in Austria just days before the outbreak of the Austro-Prussian war in 1866 and Lord Salisbury visited France ...”

“... odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once ...”

“... its own.’ ‘The third sector and the third party could go together.’ But co-ops, they freely concede, do conjure up one or another of two dispiriting pictures. One is of the Co-op itself, an unenticing alternative to Sainsbury or Waitrose or the larger Marks and Spencer. The other is of disemployed artisans, left behind by technical change and ...”

“... for the frankness of his self-denigration. ‘Clamence’ explicitly denotes clamans – the false John the Baptist crying in the wilderness: it also, I believe, has overtones of clemency, though in this partial self-portrait Camus in no way spares himself. He set the book as far as possible from the scenes of his equivocal sun-baked epiphanies – not in ...”

“... defiance of mourning, purchased in the month of August, he might have been expected to perspire as freely as Dr Jaeger could have hoped, particularly since he also kitted himself out with Dr Jaeger’s Sanitary Woollen Braces, Woollen Shirt and Woollen Coat. Plenty to draw out the poisonous vapours there, it might be supposed, but the interesting thing is that ...”

“... other books – Meghan Daum’s The Problem with Everything; Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances; John McWhorter’s Woke Racism – but Nelson is unusual in wanting to be read as a good-faith actor. She signals her allegiance to the etiquette of political correctness and believes in its values, but she thinks we should find a middle way, one that doesn’t ...”

“... of the town without consulting him. She never comes back. It is shrugged off very casually: King John (somebody told me) Said to a man he knew: ‘If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?’ I used to recite it (in my day children were called on to torture visitors in this way), but while I enjoyed the rhythm and the pace, it gave ...”